


As I Lay to Die

by NeoVenus22



Category: Dead Like Me
Genre: Extended Scene, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:42:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mason comes to visit George, and maybe outstays his welcome.  An extended scene from 'Curious George'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As I Lay to Die

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: 1x03, 'Curious George'; AU beyond that.

George never knew if Mason was flirting or not. He had this look, this smile, which crinkled in all the right places and made him look like he had the absolute best secret which he would share with you if you asked him nicely.

Of course, in George's experience, Mason's secrets were rarely anything she wanted to hear.

He came into her apartment while she was sleeping. Funny how he could work the door so easily, when she lived there and had to practically use a battering ram to get in half the time. She had forgotten to turn off the TV last night, or had fallen asleep while watching it, not that it mattered, and now it was set to the news. The TV hadn't woken her; Mason's incessant banging had.

"Are you robbing me?" she asked, mind clouded and voice thick with sleep.

Mason didn't even bother turning around. "Nope, there's nothing to fucking rob." He checked each of her cabinets systematically, and while she watched this, she wondered when she'd started considering the chipped paint, creaky hinges, and dust bunnies 'hers.'

"I was dreaming about frogs." She wasn't sure why she was telling him; when she thought about it later, she would chalk it up to exhaustion. Of course, when she thought about it later, this would be the part of the conversation she wouldn't quite remember.

"Real ones, or like, Kermit?" He sounded almost as though he was interested, almost as though he cared.

"Real ones."

"Huh. I saw a movie about frogs. They got pissed, and ate a bunch of people on an island." He checked each barren bookshelf, and when he looked at her again, it was the most earnest he'd ever been. "I think it was called _Frogs_."

It occurred to George that she hadn't seen enough movies in her life. She could see them now, she thought, and have popcorn (that she couldn't afford), and put her feet on the back of the chair in front of her, and it would almost be exactly the same, only not. Because she wouldn't get to go with her friends, and when the old person in front of her turned around to shush her for laughing too loudly, they'd see a Millie, and not a George.

"Were they bad people?"

"Nah, they littered, or something," Mason said dismissively.

"I only like it when bad people die." She wasn't a bad person. She was a little unmotivated, and a lot angry, but she was never a bad person.

"I like it when nobody dies. So I don't have to work." There was cologne from the dead kid lying on top of the dresser, and George hated that she didn't remember his name, even though she'd met his parents, and his girlfriend, and was squatting in his apartment. And had watched him die. Mason spritzed himself liberally with the dead boy's cologne.

"What would happen if everybody died?" she wondered.

"What d'you mean?" He was going through her drawers now. Not that there was anything of interest or worth prodding. She was scavenging fragments from her old life. The bottom drawer was still the dead kid's; she'd been too afraid to go through it herself.

"Like, if we were the only ones left."

"Oh. You mean like, if the frogs ate everyone on the planet." The tiny, crappy bed creaked under his sudden weight as he sat down behind her.

She looked over her shoulder at him, "Yeah."

"Reckon we'd be shoveling a lot of frog shit. Did you shovel frog shit in your dream?"

"No." It occurred to her this was the longest conversation not about 'work' she'd had with any of the Reapers since she'd died. And it was about frogs and shit and death. "The frog was carrying me on its back over a river of lava."

"A frog," he repeated, and he was staring at her.

"Yeah." She remembered Reggie used to have this book about analyzing your dreams, where any possible thing you could think of always had some deep, subconscious meaning. Reggie had so many weird habits and obsessions and George had always dismissed them out of hand, just like she dismissed her sister. She would've liked it now, to look at the book with Reggie, to laugh about giant frogs and how they somehow related to George's life.

Mason was giving her that godawful grin, the one where she couldn't tell if he was taking her seriously, or if he thought she was crazy, or what. If George had been more awake, she would have been annoyed. Instead, she just sort of quirked her lips back at him. It felt alien; she didn't think she'd actually smiled in quite some time. "I have to go," said Mason, but he didn't move.

George had a thousand and one questions about death and the undead. She should've asked Rube, but he always seemed to be pissed or pitying, and George was rarely in the mood for either. Rube never answered her questions, anyway. So no matter how stupid an idea it probably was, she asked Mason. "We can do everything the living can, right?" she said. She wasn't expecting Mason to provide great insight, but he wouldn't evade the question.

"Everything except get hurt." He gave a tiny giggle. "I once got a fishing hook, right here in my forehead." He pointed at the spot, halfway between where there would've been a bindi dot and a widow's peak, if he'd had either. "Tore half my skin off. I didn't even bleed. Would've given the fisherman a heart attack, if he hadn't already died from one a minute before. He only had sixty dollars on him."

"We can eat," she thought aloud. "And use the bathroom. Can we get sick?"

"Not really. Nothing viral." His stare was stripping her down, as if he could see all the way down to her soul. Which she figured he probably could. After all. "We can fuck."

George didn't move. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Being dead is the best protection there is."

How completely disturbing.

George only ever had one boyfriend, if you could call it that. Simon Stevenson, senior year. He broke up with her because he 'didn't think long-distance relationships worked.' George figured it was because she wouldn't put out. She hadn't been kissed since, although she'd thought about it.

And then she'd died.

"Can we date?" she asked.

"Why would we want to?"

George shrugged a little bit, but only a little, because she was propped on one arm and shrugging wasn't easy. "Companionship."

"Why?" he posed again. "They're just going to die. And we're going to keep doing whatever it is that we do, until we get to move upwards."

She hadn't thought of that. She was still going to be alive —well, sort of— when her parents died. When her sister died. She tugged her blanket a little tighter around her.

"What's that?"

"'m cold," she lied. Well, there was a half-truth in there somewhere.

"You should pay your heating bill."

"Huh." Heat would come after food. She couldn't live on waffles alone, after all. Or un-live. Whatever. She wouldn't have minded trying, but it was expensive, and she couldn't keep batting her eyes at the others and playing 'poor dead me.' That had only worked once, really, anyway, and only when she'd first bit it. They were altogether unsympathetic to the needs of a growing dead girl. Her stomach rumbled in sympathy, and when her mind cleared of food, she found Mason's lips against her forehead.

"You're very interesting," he observed.

"Interesting how?" she asked, now dazed for an entirely different reason. Occasional pats on the shoulder from her co-Reapers or the brushing of hands as she popped souls were the only form of physical contact she'd had in awhile. It surprised her that Mason was sort of warm. Not really warm, but she didn't think he would be really warm, but then again, she didn't think he'd be warm at all. Her skin felt hot where he'd touched it.

"Just interesting," he said, his face hovering near hers, although his lips were still level with her forehead so she couldn't see his eyes and couldn't tell if he was joking or not. She could feel his breath. "You ask a lot of questions."

"Are questions bad?" The stupid newscaster was still buzzing in her ear, but more quietly now, like a fly in the house that was moving from room to room, the sound fading in and out. "Didn't you ask a lot of questions when you died?"

Mason didn't answer. At least, not in words. He kissed her for real this time, mouth on mouth, and George had forgotten she could use her mouth for other things besides crunching on stolen cookies and complaining and making inane conversation. He tasted like Der Waffle Haus coffee. He tasted like...

Like the closest thing to life she'd ever get again.

Actions preceded conscious thought by only a few moments. Mason's hand was on her shoulder, his tongue was in her mouth. Did this happen a lot, she wondered, Reaper relationships? Was it forbidden or something? Who else had Mason kissed? Betty, maybe? Not Roxy. Normal, living people? She kissed him back almost desperately, needing to see how far back into the past she could get through Mason's lips. She needed to get the one tiny connection to life that she could feel just beyond his mouth. It was like kissing a glass someone else had sipped from, and pretending you had kissed them. George was trying futilely to get there, to life.

The blanket fell back. George was reclining and it wasn't difficult for Mason to lay on top of her. In the back of her mind, she held a vague notion that Rube would probably kill her if he found out, but at the moment, she couldn't care less. She was already dead, anyway.

Mason was warmer still when his body was holding her down to the lumpy, worthless mattress. George told herself that was why she pressed into him, melded into him, so she could feel the heat, but she was making a lot of excuses to justify this. She was thinking about it far too much.

She wasn't expecting grand romance. She wasn't expecting anything, pretty much. She was wearing ratty old pajama pants to bed, which was indicative enough of a lack of romance or sentimentality. No silk or satin or lace, just flannel worn flat and thin. There was a metaphor in it, maybe, but metaphors hadn't been George's strong point in school. In college, they all wanted metaphors and similes and grand, disconnected thought. George liked straight answers, liked things laid out in black and white. She'd dropped out.

Mason cupped one of her boobs through her top, more of a squeeze than a caress. It felt all right, and sort of reminded her of the clumsy groping in Simon's car. Like his predecessor, Mason fumbled his way down to her hips and batted ineffectually at her drawstring. She thought, _what the hell_, and eased her pants down her hips as best she could with Mason still on top of her. There was no real good reason for this. For any of this. But there was no real good reason against it. George was half awake, half asleep, and entirely dead. What did she have to lose? This was life, the only way they could get it, and she guessed that nervousness had never stopped Mason from screwing around. Then again, Mason was probably too stupid to ever really be nervous about anything.

On her last bus ride, George had sat next to a bespectacled, blue-haired woman engrossed in a trashy romance novel. George had read over her shoulder out of boredom more than interest, hoping it would pass the time faster. In the book, there had been fingers and hands everywhere. There had been kisses on the neck, there had been elaborate disrobing and candlelight. Mason somehow wriggled his way under the blanket, and the only fingers she felt were the ones pulling her pajama pants down to her knees, colder than the rest of him as they brushed against her bare skin. They slid up her thighs and between, checking to see if she was wet. She wasn't.

It wasn't as though she didn't find Mason attractive, because to some degree, she did. She suspected it had lots to do with that stupid smirking grin, the one that made his face crinkle and his eyes sparkle, and she thought he was appealing, so long as he never, ever spoke. When he did, it could go either way: naïve charm, or batshit crazy. Sometimes a little of both. Half the things Mason said made little to no sense, addled by alcohol or drugs or his own weird perceptions on life and afterlife. But on the whole, she did think he was cute, could be better-looking if he bothered with hygiene, and maybe there was a little bit of sexual tension between them.

Of course, sex wasn't always about the best pairing of people you could make. If that were true, her parents wouldn't be together.

"You've got to relax a bit, Georgie," he said in a strained sort of voice, like she was making him lose his concentration. He squirmed, wriggling a little, and reminding George of a puppy being introduced to a new home.

In a lot of ways, she mused, Mason did remind her of a small dog. He floundered about, doing bad things and trying to play it off innocently, never learning from his mistakes, struggling for approval, afraid of admonishment.

Sinking into the mattress under Mason's weight, George thought about the boy that had slept here before her, the one with a fetish for older women and cloying cologne. She could smell it on Mason, all over Mason, he'd put on too much and was starting to sweat through it. She didn't think that she'd ever seen —or would see again— Mason sweat. Where he lacked any sort of work ethic, he did seem to have priorities.

She could feel something in every rock of the bed. She wondered if she should even call the dead kid a kid when he was her age, or maybe a few years older. George could feel his presence, his sweat locked deep in the crevasses of the mattress. It was a nasty notion, all the spilled and dripped bacteria, but if she didn't think about that, she could concentrate on the connection. The cologne of the living above her, the tracks of his love affairs below her.

"Georgie," said Mason, giggling like he was stoned, which if she knew Mason at all, he very well could have been, "are you just going to lie there and do nothing?"

"I... don't know. I don't know what to do."

Mason didn't register this statement for several beats, then he abruptly stilled. In his absence of movement, George could feel him completely. His stomach pressed against hers, his knees trapping the folds of her bunched pajama pants, pulling the folds taut across her leg. She swore she could hear the blood pumping in his veins. "Oh," he said. "Why didn't you say something?" His voice was starting to get high-pitched, like she was beginning to recognize it did when he trying not to get caught.

She shrugged as well as she could. "I dunno." She didn't know anything. She had died without knowing anything about life, and now she was here, not knowing anything about death.

"Oh," he said again.

"Do you guys even like me?"

"Like you?" He shifted uncomfortably, and she could feel him in her and over her and all around her, and for the first time, she didn't feel uncomfortable. This felt... kind of normal, in its own weird way. "Is this really the best time for this conversation?" he whined, and he really was whining. George didn't answer, and Mason got the hint. He pulled out and rolled onto his back beside her. George focused her gaze on the stained ceiling, so she wouldn't accidentally see things she didn't have to see. She supposed she shouldn't have been hung up on sex, since she'd just sort of had it, or not had it, whichever, but it was _Mason_, and she ate breakfast with him, and didn't want to see his junk. Not if she ever wanted to eat again.

"Of course we like you, Georgie," he said, with more affection than she'd really been expecting. "I mean, Roxy doesn't like you, but Roxy doesn't bloody like anyone. And Rube... well, now that I think about it, Rube doesn't really like anyone, either. Except Roxy. And the waitresses at Der Waffle Haus." So if she supplied Rube with bacon, he'd be on her side. Good to know.

"I don't _know_, Georgie," he exhaled sharply, and turned to look at her with a pleading sort of helplessness in his eyes. "I'm not a fucking mind-reader, I don't know what they think."

"Well, do you like me?" Maybe it sounded a little pathetic, but maybe she was feeling a little pathetic and vulnerable and stupid this morning. She hadn't even had her coffee yet.

"Do I like you? Sweetheart," and it was strange word to have spilling out of his lips, "I wouldn't be here if I didn't like you. It's not like you have anything to _steal_." Mason patted at her head like a special-ed kid would paw clumsily at a bunny. "You're a good person, George," he said. "Maybe a little bitchy, but I think that means you'll fit in okay."

In a weird way, she found comfort in that. "Mason, you're not going to... _tell_ anyone about this, are you?"

Mason giggled again. "Oh, sure. Great breakfast conversation. 'Thanks for the post-it, Rube, by the way, I fucked your little prodigy over there.'"

"Prodigy?"

He frowned thoughtfully. "Maybe I meant protégé. Whatever." Without warning, struck by another unknowable impulse in his ADD-rattled mind, Mason bounced around until he somehow miraculously landed on the floor, on his feet. He zipped his pants, and George turned her head away and pulled the blanket up to her ear. Watching Mason would give a certain gravity to the whole situation. Minor details like him checking his zipper might make her remember this, and she wasn't sure she wanted to. It wasn't bad, it was just weird, and she had too much weirdness in her life, or death, already.

"I need to borrow a knife," he said, and this made George jerk into an upright position. She pulled the blanket off her face abruptly, making her static-y hair to dance across her forehead and make her eyelids itch. She stared at him, half incredulous and half horrified.

"What?"

"A knife. You got one?"

George gawked at him in bland disbelief. She wondered if he was some sort of black widow spider, seducing his victims before chopping them to bits. Would it matter if she was chopped to bits? Would she just reform back into one undead mass? It was too gross and painful to contemplate, and that aside, she refused to believe she'd been seduced. It gave Mason too much credit and took away all of her own.

"Yeah," she said, shaking her head to clear her vision and her addled mind. That stupid newscaster was still talking about the bear at the rest stop. "There should be one. Somewhere."

Mason rifled through a few drawers noisily, and finally emerged from one with a good-sized knife. "You gonna need this back?" he asked cheerfully.

"Keep it," she said, distaste puckering her mouth slightly.

"Not my intention," he said, cementing the notion that she did not want to know how he spent his time. "George. Are you going to be all right?"

Like some drunks had their brief flashes of stunning sobriety, even Mason, it would seem, was capable of insight and humanity. Both as thanks and as reward, she nodded. "Fine. About this, I wasn't..." George gestured, because talking about it, even vaguely, still seemed like too much.

"Ready?" he said.

"Yeah, that. I wasn't... it wasn't... Maybe some other time, I mean."

Mason smiled, and though he was on the other side of the room, he wasn't so far away that she couldn't read the surprising friendliness in his expression. "Right. Maybe." He said it like he was humoring her, like he knew, they both knew, that whatever this was just wasn't, and wouldn't ever be.

George flopped back down on the bed, intending to go back to sleep, and Mason moved over to the door and opened it. In the threshold, his hand still on the knob, he smiled at her. "By the way, Georgie."

"Yeah?"

"I showed you a good time, and now you owe me breakfast. See you later," he trilled, laughing, and shut the door behind him just a half second before her assailant pillow thumped against the wood.

George had even less of a clue what the hell was going on between herself and Mason, if anything, but at the moment, she didn't really care. He was cute, but he was an idiot, and it wasn't her job to baby-sit him anymore than it was his to baby-sit her. She drew the blanket back over her head, thinking she'd have a crick in her neck all day, but too unmotivated to go and fetch the lone pillow from where it was slumped on the floor. Instead, she just went back to sleep.


End file.
